


time veil

by dimplewoo



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Inspired by Welcome to Night Vale, M/M, Truckers, creepy cats and faceless creatures, hyunwoo was missing and jooheon found him, the setting is vaguely american?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 19:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18745819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimplewoo/pseuds/dimplewoo
Summary: Hyunwoo is waiting for him. Somewhere, somehow, he’s waiting for Jooheon to save him. At least that’s what Minhyuk said the faceless figure told him.





	time veil

**Author's Note:**

> submission for round two of the jooheon bingo, "truckers" square.
> 
> this is heavily inspired by the alice isn't dead podcast and the whole night vale universe and if you've never listened to both those podcasts, you're missing out. this is also part of a universe i'm writing another fic in (that happens before this one) so... maybe i'll get around to writing that one too before i get dehydrated from crying over not writing.
> 
> i also legit have no idea how i managed to dish this out in 6-8ish hours but i did and i'm glad because now i can stop crying over not writing anything for the billions of bingos i signed up for. ;_;
> 
> note: not proof-read, unedited

Creaks and hisses pervade Jooheon’s hearing behind him as he brakes to a still and stops his truck a couple feet from the pedestrian walk. His catatonic hands hold on to the steering wheel to the point of white knuckles. His shoulders slump from the past uninterrupted three hours and a half of seeing cars speed past him on the highway. His tired, dry, sunken eyes float up to the traffic light, the bright red glowing almost ominously in the sky next to a fading moon.

It’s nearly sunrise, the deep dark blue sky diffusing with light orange hues far away on the horizon line. Jooheon is losing hours in the day, losing time, but he isn’t losing hope. He can’t lose hope.

Hyunwoo is waiting for him. Somewhere, somehow, he’s waiting for Jooheon to save him. At least that’s what Minhyuk said the faceless figure told him. That it wasn’t trying to hide Hyunwoo anymore, that it didn’t need to hide him now that it got what it wanted. It said he was under a spell, it said Hyunwoo wouldn’t be able to recognize him. It didn’t say anything about how to break it, or if it could be broken. But Jooheon didn’t care.

All he wanted to and had to do first was find him.

The streets are empty, silent. A stray cat stares from above a dumpster bin behind a Chinese restaurant, irises gleaming red and bloody under its neon sign. _He’s near,_ Jooheon thinks, senses, knows. It took a while to get used to the signs, to learn how to read the supernatural when you’re not gifted.

Minhyuk can see what shouldn’t be seen, Jooheon has to look for it. Street cats staring at him wherever he stopped told him that he had to go in the direction their tails pointed. Gas station and convenience store clocks freezing at 6:18 AM no matter the time of day told him Hyunwoo was near.

He never quite understood why the faceless figure played him like this, leaving little clues as to where Hyunwoo was only to take him away the second he was within arm’s reach, like a teasing brute snatching away a child’s lollipop the moment it looked like it was enjoying the sweet a bit _too much._

The faceless figure would leave him clues, notes, a news headline with Hyunwoo’s name in it as a goad to drive him over the edge of irritation into anger, weaving his picture into a concert poster glued to an old traffic control box to turn his anger to frustration. Interrupting the white noise of his FM radio keeping him awake at ungodly hours of the night with tantalizing messages to foster desperation.

  
**\- .-. -.--   .- --. .- .. -.**  
**t   r    y      a   g   a** **i  n**  


It was too easy, to give into the faceless figure’s taunts, to give up on his resolve, pack his feelings into a bottle, throw it away and go back home. But he didn’t take this truck driver job for the hell of it, he did it for a reason. And that reason was, is, and he hopes it won’t always be Hyunwoo. It was tough at first, challenging, to go on his quest and satisfy his boss at the same time without getting fired, but the faceless figure caught on.

It started moving Hyunwoo around the country on a whim to follow Jooheon’s driving trajectory, haphazardly at first, until he learned to read the signs and the faceless figure seemingly found it fun to mess with him. And it was messing with him, because he was not the patient and forbearing type. He wanted Hyunwoo back and he wanted him now. Eventually, Jooheon learned to accept that _now_  could be in six days, two weeks, three months. Eventually, he made peace with the idea that if it took four more months until he could see Hyunwoo again, then so be it.

All he had to do was persist.

But today, he does park next to a twenty-four hour diner at 6:18 AM when three stray cats sleeping by the entrance lift their heads to look at him with their tails pointed at the door. The outside walls bear no posters. His radio is silent. _Finally._

Pushing it open with his forearm, Jooheon walks in with small steps, wiggling the numbness from sinking into the driver’s seat for hours away. A bell above the door rings. Flickers of pale blue from a malfunctioning tube light reflect on the black and white checkered floor. There are no customers.

Dread settles like a swarm of hornets in the pit of his stomach as he stills in the middle of the room. There’s a tarnished jukebox by a window, and a pair of glowing red eyes boring into his soul through the blinds. The gulp Jooheon swallows down gets stuck at the back of his throat before it can go anywhere else. He either can’t smell anything or the air smells like nothing at all.

“How may I help you, sir?”

The swiftness with which his upper body twists to meet eyes with the voice’s owner nearly makes him dizzy, but not as much as finally seeing Hyunwoo face to face does. The conflicting urges to stand still in disbelief and leap towards the counter collide within him to form a whimper, that soon gets stopped by the dreadful feeling that something is wrong.

It isn’t the fact that Hyunwoo addresses him as sir, that he doesn’t recognize him, that he appeared out of thin air by the coffee machine without a sound to his steps. It’s the grease pompadour, the neat bowtie, the stiff collar, the pristine white shirt, the black vest with dark gray stripes. The soft jazz tunes reaching his ears, the low chatter of customers, the clinking of coffee cups against china saucers, the warm afternoon light filtering through the curtains.

Being stuck in a time that isn’t his.

The spell.

“Hyunwoo,” the name escapes his lips like a whisper, a word too taboo for him to pronounce, too precious for him to waste should he have no chance at all to regain what was lost to him. Hyunwoo raises his eyebrows ever so slightly at hearing his name, Jooheon glad that his body recognizes the memory of that sound enough to let him know that it’s there, that it remembers, with something as imperceptible as a twitch. A twitch that looks like a call for help.

Jooheon’s mouth dries up as he curls his hands into two small, clammy fists, trying to swallow down the fear and bile climbing up his throat.

“I, uh, I’ll take a double espresso,” he says through tight lips and an awkward you-can-probably-tell-how-tired-I-am-from-driving-all-night smile, “please.” He walks up to the counter, fishing for some change in his oversized denim jacket. He figures if he wants him back, Jooheon will have to go about it less obviously than by pleading for Hyunwoo to remember who he is. If the faceless figure’s game was anything to go by, it will have to take subtlety.

Hyunwoo nods courteously and starts grinding coffee beans. He doesn’t look hurt, his neck and forearms bearing no scratches or bruises, and that means the faceless figure kept its promise not to harm him. It did say it never needed to touch a hair on Hyunwoo’s head, but Jooheon wouldn’t admonish himself for worrying that it would. Nobody did.

After all, you can’t trust the words of someone— some _thing_ with no eyes.

He probably shouldn’t touch anything, Jooheon thinks. He doesn’t know his way around magic enough to even properly tell that there’s magic around him at all, let alone figure out how to undo something that he isn’t sure is a spell to begin with. But no matter the level of knowledge, erring on the side of caution is still always better than ending up stuck in the seventies at the whim of some odd creature that probably predates human civilization.

The earthy smell of coffee fills his brain with comforting thoughts of lazy mornings reading in bed while Hyunwoo made breakfast. Every tinkle of glass against metal in his memory and before him feels like a pinprick at his heart, drawing tears out of his eyes.

Hyunwoo sets the small cup on the counter and pushes it towards Jooheon with two hands, serving him a polite curl and two sugar cubes on the side. “That’ll be fifty cents, sir.”

And Jooheon needs to touch, to feel the warmth he had been so starved of that he forgot what it meant to hold a hand. To hell with the spell.

With a tremble, he reaches for the saucer, to pull it towards him, touching Hyunwoo’s fingers first — a precaution that feeds his yearning, a precaution that keeps him from becoming another pawn in the faceless figure’s rigged chess game for a measly microsecond. A precaution that brings back the flickering tube lights, the checkered floor, and Hyunwoo to the present.

“Joo… heon… what—” Hyunwoo blinks, once, twice, five times, turning his head to have a look around the premises. His hand is kept warm between Jooheon’s palms, who wouldn’t be able to stop himself from smiling even if he needed to.

“I found you,” he sobbed with a breath, “I found you, I finally found you.” Prickles and burns cover Jooheon’s eyes until he wills them away. He hasn’t seen Hyunwoo in nearly half a year, his vision can blur with tears later.

“What do you mean, found me? Where are we?” Confusion and at least a thousand questions set deep in the crease between Hyunwoo’s brows, but they don’t deter him from massaging his thumbs into the backs of Jooheon’s hands.

“You disappeared after you dove to save Hyungwon from getting his eyes plucked out, you don’t remember?” Jooheon sniffles, and the air feels eerily cold in his sinuses. He pulls Hyunwoo against him, slowly, waiting for his body to understand the message that his brain was likely too dazed to perceive.

“N-No,” Hyunwoo lifts himself up and throws his legs over the counter to jump on the other side and in front of Jooheon, immediately taking him in his arms and burrowing his face in his neck. His rapid breathing slows down against Jooheon’s skin and he feels him relax the more he rubs soothing hands over his back. “You look tired, baby.”

Jooheon sighs. Long, deep, loud. His heavy lids slide down, bringing down with them the stinging feeling of sleepiness and exhaustion. He pulls Hyunwoo closer to him, closer than the sky is to the ocean on a storm-less day, with the hope that by blurring the line of where he ends and Hyunwoo starts, he can begin to catch up on all the time they lost. But for now, he’s content enjoying the beating of their hearts against one another. He leaves a shower of pecks over Hyunwoo’s cheek that he reciprocates, a hand grazing his nape while the other rests against Hyunwoo’s chest. He feels Hyunwoo’s hands interlacing in the pocket of his hoodie, gentle gazes meeting between their foreheads and rubbing noses, and it feels much better than an illusory cup of strong coffee would have ever managed to make him feel.

“Let’s go take a nap.” He doesn’t answer the silent question in his eyes, one of many. The answers will come with time, in time, just not now. Right now, Jooheon needs a couple hours removed far away from anything that isn’t purely human. And cuddles.

“A nap? Where?”

“I set myself up a little bed in the container at the back of my truck.”

“… your truck?”

Jooheon giggles at his knotted eyebrows, squeezing Hyunwoo’s hand in his as he pushes the front door open with his forearm again. “Sleep now, explanations later.”

Neither of them notice the cat's eyes following their backs, its tail pointing towards a faceless figure standing in the middle of the abandoned, decrepit diner.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [twt](https://twitter.com/moonipies) and [cc](https://curiouscat.me/moonipies) if you wanna talk or send me any prompts! i'd like to start writing a few drabbles every now and then.


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